Customer Reviews

Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics) (No. 1)

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if you love the late barthes, drool over the melancholic nature of lack and need another foundation from which to cry 'alienation' in the face of the one/multiplicity- stiegler is your man!

his derridian inversion, making technicity the de-fault, determining structure of dasein is interesting for the ride- but it's merely formal play. by shifting from an oral/written (instrumental) conception of temporality to a written/industrial (cybernetic) division, one reads, especially in the second volume (la desorientation- only out in french), the same negative engagement Heidegger had with modernity.

before reading stiegler ask yourself: must i do this (for school)? am i a true disciple of phenomenology (hegel, husserl, heidegger, merleau-ponty, etc.)? will i be engaged by hearing virilio-esque media hysteria? do i revel in adorno-esque negativity, put my trust in a top-down image of the culture industry, and/or have no particular concern for the question of agency/appropriation?

if more than 50% were yes, then this is for you, those folks who love existential analytics combined with a high culture conservatism.

the technique and the time of Bernard Stiegler propose a philosophical analysis of technicality. Stiegler shows that this one is originating. If the Western culture analyzed the technique like a fault (Promotheus), it must now be seen like a defect, the defect even of the originating one. Heir to Derrida, of which he was the pupil, Stiegler starts a turning in the philosophical analysis of the destiny of the technique.